As time goes on, society continues to need more and more capacity for information exchange. Satellite telecommunications plays an increasing role in fulfilling that need. To fulfill society's need for satellite telecommunications capacity, companies launch sophisticated satellites and sell satellite capacity to other companies or entities. The traditional model for selling satellite capacity involved extended negotiations, contract drafting, the exchange of paper documents, and agreements weeks or even months in advance of actual transponder use by the customer.
With most existing telecommunications satellites, network engineers require a significant lead time in order to configure the network, the satellite and the transponders to service various customers' needs. With the limited flexibility of the traditional telecommunications satellite network, the sales model which included extended negotiations, contract drafting and significant lead time was adequate. However, as telecommunications satellites are growing more sophisticated, a need has arisen for an equally more sophisticated means of managing satellite capacity.
An example of a sophisticated satellite telecommunications system is a packet switched network, offering increased capacity by utilizing frequency reuse via a plurality of geographically distinct uplink and downlink cells. Individual cells can be accessible by antennas on the satellite which projects one or more spot beams. The spot beams allow satellite capacity to be increased because frequencies can be reused in geographically distinct areas. Capacity can be further increased by having a switching network incorporated into the satellite so that demodulators can be assigned to different uplink antennas so that more demodulators are available where more capacity is needed. A sophisticated payload control computer can also be used on board the satellite to allow continuous updating of the demodulator-to-antenna assignments. Thus, end-users can essentially increase or decrease their capacity requirements in real time, in varying geographic areas, and utilize only the capacity that is needed at any given moment. This allows the satellite capacity to be partitioned very efficiently, and in real time.
The traditional method of negotiating written contracts for use of transponder time is too cumbersome to take advantage of the increased flexibility of the types of satellite systems described above. Accordingly, a need exists for a more sophisticated approach to managing satellite capacity. That is, a system and method are needed which will accommodate customers' varying needs over time while taking into consideration the system's physical restraints such as the number of demodulators, the number of antennas, and the available switches on board the satellite, as well as taking into consideration other factors, such as minimizing interference between adjacent cells.
Such a system should provide a simple interface to network engineers, wholesalers and broadband services (BBS) end-users alike, while performing the highly complicated functions of satisfying the maximum number of capacity requests, while minimizing inter-cell and inter-frequency interference, and at the same time taking into consideration all known hardware and physical constrains on the system.